SF finally remembering Jonestown victims where it all began

1of2Yulanda Williams, who grew up a member of the Peoples Temple but left Jonestown at age 21 a year before the mass suicide, is now a San Francisco police officer.Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

2of2Memorial flowers at the Fillmore-Turk mini park in San Francisco in 2008. Under the current plan for park renovations, there will be a memorial wall for the Jonestown victims in the park.Photo: Kim Komenich / The Chronicle

Every year, the survivors of Jonestown and their families have held a memorial service in Oakland’s Evergreen Cemetery in honor of the 900-plus victims of the 1978 tragedy.

But the Peoples Temple was in San Francisco. It stood at 1859 Geary Blvd., between Fillmore and Steiner. Cult leader Jim Jones was active in San Francisco politics, and many of his followers came from the historic African American neighborhood in which his church was based.

So I was shocked to learn that there hadn’t been a memorial service for these victims in San Francisco.

Sunday, Nov. 18, is the 40th anniversary of the Jonestown massacre. It’s also the first time there will be a public ceremony — with speeches and music and the whole nine yards — in San Francisco in honor of the victims and those who managed to survive.

The event is called Homecoming, and it launches with a 2 p.m. march from the former site of the Peoples Temple at 1859 Geary, followed by a 3 p.m. program at the Fillmore Heritage Center. The event is the kickoff to a new effort to create a victims’ memorial at the park.

“It’s San Francisco history and it should’ve never been swept under the carpet,” said Yulanda Williams, a 62-year-old San Francisco Police Department lieutenant and a Jonestown survivor. “It’s important for people here to know what happened so we don’t repeat history, because all the issues we were dealing with in the 1970s are still around right now.”

Williams was just 21 years old when she managed to talk Jones into letting her, her husband and their child leave Guyana the year before the massacre.

Although she’d been in the church since she was 11 years old, in Guyana she realized that Jones was demanding “ultimate control” and that she had to get out.

“At the time, I was terrified because I knew (Jones) was capable of killing me,” Williams said. “So to lose 900 of my brothers and sisters — it was very, very traumatic for me. I’ve done a lot of thinking about how best to show other young people how they can protect themselves and spot the warning signs of sinister leaders.”

Part of Williams’ solution involved becoming a police officer.

Another part of it, she said, will be having a monument to the Jonestown victims in San Francisco. Williams is scheduled as one of the speakers on Sunday.

It’s hard to say why San Francisco hasn’t done this already. The city’s political leadership failed badly when it came to recognizing who Jones was and what he was doing, and I have no doubt that guilt has played a big role in the official silence on Jonestown.

There’s also the fact that, as I wrote last year, San Francisco prefers to celebrate its achievements while ignoring its distresses.

It’s easy to glorify the hippies, and hard to acknowledge how it might happen that a marginalized community’s desire for equality and justice could leave them susceptible to a madman.

Whatever the excuses may be, they’re not good enough anymore.

“There are a lot of plans and energy going into a renewal of the Fillmore neighborhood right now,” said Darcy Brown, executive director of San Francisco Beautiful. “We felt that in order to move forward, there had to be an attempt to put the ghosts to bed.”

Brown’s organization is working with the neighborhood’s New Community Leadership Foundation and the city’s Recreation and Park Department to renovate the Fillmore-Turk park.

They got the idea to include a permanent memorial for the Jonestown victims as part of the park renovations last year.

There were three moments of momentum, Brown said: She’d heard from the University of San Francisco historian and political scientist James Taylor that San Francisco needed a monument, she’d read my column saying that San Francisco needed to put one up, and Fillmore residents had told her that they wanted San Francisco to acknowledge this tragic event.

Brown reached out to Rec and Park, and the agency was supportive.

San Francisco Beautiful and the New Community Leadership Foundation are planning a contest to design the memorial; African American artists will be especially encouraged to apply. (More than two-thirds of the Jonestown victims were African American.)

Now it’s just a matter of raising the money to make it happen.

On that subject, Brown is pragmatic yet determined.

“I’m a native San Franciscan, and I’ve seen so many unfulfilled promises made to this community,” Brown said. “That is not something I am going to repeat.”

For the Jonestown families, Sunday’s event is a long-overdue acknowledgment of a tragedy that defined their lives. For San Francisco, it’s the start of a new beginning — the chance to reconsider an event that has had decades’ worth of unspoken consequences for the city.

Caille Millner is an editorial writer and Datebook columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. She has worked at the paper since 2006. On the editorial board, she covers a wide range of topics including business, finance, technology, education and local politics. For Datebook, she writes a weekly column on culture.She is the recipient of the Scripps-Howard Foundation’s Walker Stone Award in Editorial Writing and the Society of Professional Journalists’ Editorial Writing Award.